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Windows Server Division Delivers its Holiday Surprise: A Hyper-V Beta

Today we announced the public availability of a beta of Hyper-V, the hypervisor-based virtualization feature in Windows Server 2008. You can download it today with Windows Server 2008 Enterprise (x64) edition and let us know what you think of it.

Below is a partial list of some of the cool stuff inside Hyper-V beta.

Quick Migration and cluster high availability - for migration of VMs for planned and unplanned downtime. BTW, don’t forget that Windows Server 2008 now includes support for up to 16 nodes! (up from 8 in WS 2k3)

Hyper-V is now included by default in Windows Server manager, which means enabling virtualization is as easy as installing any other role.

Support for running Hyper-V with Server Core in the parent partition

Volume Shadow Services support

VHD Tools support (compaction, expansion and inspection)

Hyper-V MMC only installation. The Hyper-V MMC can be installed on Windows Server 2008 without installing the complete Hyper-V role enabling remote management of Hyper-V servers

Support for up to 4 virtual SCSI controllers per VM, with 255 VHDs per controller; see demo

Support for multiple network adapters per VM; see demo

Support for up to 64 GB of memory per VM

Note that Hyper-V beta is an English-US only release. The first localized releases will be available prior to RTM.

We have made numerous performance, scalability and stability enhancements since the CTP release. We are quite proud of the quality of this beta release, but it is beta, so please send any issues you might find.